When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the staff at Politics & Prose what’s on their shelves.

SLIDESHOW: Politics & Prose Staff Shelf

JONATHAN WOOLLEN (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: An El Salvadoran journalist has fled civil war to live in Mexico. Now he wants to return home at a time of highly questionable safety. This short, sharp novella, has acupuncture, family secrets, hitmen, hallucinogens, and the narrator’s all-consuming paranoia surrounding each of these things. Told in fluid and wildly extended sentences that, Castellanos Moya has crafted an hysterical novel in both senses of the word.

ADAM WATERRUS (DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS) RECOMMENDS: Tevis wanders the American landscape like an explorer: jotting down everything she sees, questioning everything around her: these essays reconcile the detritus and fallout of our present age with the wonder of a lost one, bringing a kaleidoscopic wonder to the essay form––never losing sight of the pain of the past or the loneliness of the now. These are the sorts of essays that make you sit up straight and wonder aloud, to feel the knots in your body, to look at the world through prismatic glass in sparkling wonder.

ANGELA MARIA SPRING (GENERAL MANAGER) RECOMMENDS: With a fragmented, oftentimes poetic, narrative, an unnamed protagonist searches for someone or something in a hotel where rooms move and nothing is as it seems. Told in broken pieces, Unrue takes us from the hotel to a city to a large estate. Her genius is in how utterly captured you are as a reader and her prose, at times so lush and foreign, drags you down slowly and you don’t ever want to surface. Just pick this book up, begin reading and be willing to follow Unrue down the rabbit hole.

LAURIE GREER (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Unnamed because he’s been so many different people, the narrator of Georgi Gospodinov‘s vertiginous second novel is born with the ability to enter anyone’s memory and relive even the repressed or forgotten details of experiences not his own. Fueled by both outrage and humor, the novel charts the labyrinths of history and families, minds and cities; Gospodinov attacks his subjects with a furious energy, but his vision is always informed by a deep compassion—regardless of the relative proportions of beast and human in one’s temperament.

JON PURVES (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: Paul Beatty has never been afraid to court offense but Beatty’s easily got the talent, wit, and insight to justify every shocking sentence, and every outrageous sentiment. Beatty delivers page after page of quick-fire hilarity, absurdity and profundity. He doesn’t so much skewer the serious societal issues of our age as rip them limb-from-limb, in one of the most instantly recognizable voices in modern literature.